ATLAS Experiment Upgrade Wins DOE Project Management Award

The U.S. ATLAS Phase I Detector Upgrade team, led jointly by Stony Brook University and U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has received the Secretary’s Achievement Award in recognition of project management excellence. The upgrade is one of only three to be honored with a DOE project management award this year.

Completed in August 2019, the U.S. ATLAS Phase I Detector Upgrade was an initial step toward a larger upgrade now in-progress for the Large Hadron Collider — the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) project. The overarching goal is to substantially increase the LHC’s luminosity, enabling scientists to collect 10 times more data from particle collisions, observe very rare processes, and make new discoveries about the building blocks of matter and how the universe works.

The U.S. ATLAS Phase I Detector Upgrade was a $44 million effort, jointly supported by DOE and the National Science Foundation (NSF), to build modern and more efficient electronics for ATLAS, providing the experiment with new and improved functionalities such as higher data collection rates. Specifically, the project focused on three components of ATLAS: the trigger/data acquisition system, the liquid argon calorimeter and the forward muon detector (known as the New Small Wheel).
“The project team successfully navigated unique difficulties related to the highly international nature of the project, for which the lessons learned have been documented for the benefit of future projects,” said Project Manager Chris Bee, principal research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University.

“The very strong support we received from Brookhaven Lab, our DOE and NSF program offices, the Brookhaven Site Office, and the Stony Brook Office of Sponsored Programs and on-campus project office personnel was essential to this success.”
“The completion of this upgrade allows ATLAS to maintain our scientific goals in an era when the LHC accelerator performance exceeds the original design targets,” added John Hobbs, principal investigator and professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook.